In the 10 years since this book was first published, London has, says Joe Kerr, been "convulsed by change on a seismic scale": globalisation, the 7/7 bombings, the financial crisis, last year's riots and the continuing "vertiginous vertical expansion of its skyline". But despite such traumas and transformations, London remains London, and the essays in this volume try to make sense of this ancient, beguiling city. In more than 30 articles, writers eloquently explore what it was like to be in London "in the dying years of the last century". The "atmosphere of slow decline" in 1977 was replaced two decades later by the "24-hour city, caught up in an unceasing cycle of consumption". Highlights include Katie Wales on London's languages (there are as many as 700); Nicholas Royle on its abandoned buildings and the "empty spaces at the heart of big cities"; Tom Dyckhoff on London's brief fling with Manhattan-style loft living; and Roger Luckhurst's descent into the occult city, tracing how London has become "a sublime object that invokes awe and evades capture".